Guess who I rode up with in the elevator?
Here’s a clue: they held the elevators for them. Yes, it’s the owners of the Red Wings and Tigers, Mike and Marian Ilitch. Mrs. I asked if I was staying the night since I had a wheeling computer case with me. I’m just hoping it’s not actually the whole night, as in the Canucks and Stars.

San Jose Sharks leading goal-scorer Jonathan Cheechoo underwent an MRI on Thursday and is listed as day-to-day with a knee sprain.
Cheechoo, who was not using crutches but was heavily wrapped, is listed as ‘‘extremely doubtful’’ for Game 2 but a final determination on that won’t be made until Friday.

San Jose coach Ron Wilson had no problems sharing his anger.
‘‘But the league apparently has addressed it, and we’ll just go forward. Cheechoo, I don’t know when he’ll play. Hopefully he’ll be able to come back this playoff. I don’t know right now,’’ Wilson said.
Asked if that meant Cheechoo wouldn’t return in this best-of-seven series or this postseason, Wilson said he did not know. Game 2 is Friday night in Nashville.
Predators coach Barry Trotz studied eight different angles of the collision near the Nashville blue line nine minutes into the second period. Hartnell was ejected and given a five-minute major for kneeing.
‘‘The more I look at it, the more I realize it’s probably not even a penalty. He went to hit him, Cheechoo tried to get out of the way. Unfortunately, they locked knees, and Cheechoo got the worst of it. In terms of the elbow in the face, which I think was claimed, he hit his mouth on the ice,’’ Trotz said.

Gotta hand it to Chris Chelios. Two-and-a-half hours before Game 1 and there he was on WDFN, and here is on A2Y. Today he discusses playoff pressure, Big Brett changing picks on the fly, postseason officiating and the importance of one H. Zetterberg. Listen here and turn up your volume, the recording is low today.

Three hours and change, or the equivalent of one half of a Vancouver/Bubba Sr. game. Speaking of which, the die-hards who stayed up and watched that entire game are just waking up. A few of them are commenting below. You can tell they’ve had no sleep because they’re using terms like “dratto”. Of course, that was Jeff from Oklahoma…which explains his vocabulary.

NEW YORK (April 12, 2007) – NHL.com experienced record traffic on the last day of the National Hockey League’s regular season Sunday, April 8, 2007, due in part to the heated competition for a coveted spot in the Stanley Cup Playoffs and the site’s offering of original content that includes exclusive stories, video interviews with players, and the highlight show NHL On the Fly: Final.

NHL.com experienced 1,724,406 user sessions and more than 15 million page impressions on Sunday, April 8, which marks a 51.4% increase in sessions and 40.4% increase in number of page impressions compared to traffic experienced on the last day of the 2005-06 NHL regular season (April 8, 2007).

Sunday’s traffic also surpassed numbers experienced on the 2007 Trade Deadline Day (Feb. 27, 2007), which is historically one of the busiest days of the year for NHL.com, with an increase of 10.7% of sessions and 11.5% of page impressions.

Back by popular demand, we bring you the Second Annual Melrose Mullet Madness Gallery!
Just like the playoffs, the mullet is another tried and true tradition in hockey. It’s the only cut that we know that has its own motto: “business in the front, party in the back.” The only hairdo to earn a line in one of the best movies of all time, “Cool Hand Luke.” You remember, don’t you? When Dragline yelled out “mulletheads!”

But there’s one area where the CBC is going backward, not forward, and that’s with its online product.
Last night, the CBC debuted Hockey Night Online, an online only pre-game and post-game program. Unfortunately, as my friend Paul Kukla discovered, the Web cast only works for folks who have Canadian IP addresses.

They will be at the center of every game, usually the hero and often the goat, talked about more than any other player. Commentators will make excuses for them, searching for errors made by other players, and fans will curse or praise them depending on whether their team wins or loses, not on the actual quality of performance.
They are the goaltenders.
When these playoffs are over and a champion has been declared, one will leave an indelible story for the history book, an imprint on the collective memory of the sport as the one, the masked man, who best fought off the fear and insecurity and pressure to lift his team to the top of the mountain.

Mats Sundin has turned down an invitation to play for Sweden at the world hockey championship in Russia.
“It’s sad, but I can understand his decision,” coach Bengt-Ake Gustafsson said Thursday.
The 36-year-old Sundin, whose Toronto Maple Leafs missed the NHL playoffs, was one of the key players on Sweden’s team last year when it won the Olympic gold medal.
Alexander Steen of the Leafs is the only NHL player who has accepted an invitation to play for Sweden so far, but several others are expected to join the squad.

Another season has come to an end long before we would have liked, but we remain committed to improvement and patience in our plans to rebuild our franchise. The final standings show that we amassed the same number of points in 2006-07 as the prior season. And while that is true, this year’s team was better in many areas, and we demonstrated continued growth and improvement.
The power-play and the penalty-killing units both showed slight gains. We scored more goals and gave up fewer. We realize that more improvement is needed, and we will be directing our attention in that area during the summer. In the next several months we will be focused on doing what is necessary to achieve even greater strides for the 2007-08 season.

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